Robust Image-Based Visual Servo Control of an Uncertain Missile Airframe

A nonlinear vision-based guidance law is presented for a missile-target scenario in the presence of model uncertainty and unknown target evasive maneuvers. To ease the readability of this thesis, detailed explanations of any relevant mathematical tools are provided, including stability definitions, the procedure of Lyapunov-based stability analysis, sliding mode control fundamentals, basics on visual servo control, and other basic nonlinear control tools. To develop the vision-based guidance law, projective geometric relationships are utilized to combine the image kinematics with the missile dynamics in an integrated visual dynamic system. The guidance law is designed using an image-based visual servo control method in conjunction with a sliding-mode control strategy, which is shown to achieve asymptotic target interception in the presence of the aforementioned uncertainties. A Lyapunov-based stability analysis is presented to prove the theoretical result, and numerical simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed robust controller for both stationary and non-stationary targets